seeing in the dark

On the plane to Newark, North Liberty International Airport, that is, fear snuck up and gripped me like some sort of metal being inserted between the ribs. It happened too fast for me to tell what caused the sudden, heart numbing spikes, maybe it was the feeling of having lost footing I couldn't find again. Maybe it's a communal wave that swells through the cabin, through all of us who are reluctant to lift off the land.

I was dozing on the plane and kept encountering a slurry of images behind my eyelids, the wings coming off the plane, bolts breaking loose. Deep in the darkness of the irrational, at the mercy of the small cabin and its unrestrained heavings, I stopped trying to sleep.

Later there was a moment of stillness and I gained the clarity to see the fear coming, to watch its swagger and spike maneuver around me, behind me, to take me prisoner. There's something that happens in that sort of looking, when the fear becomes a tableaux not of you but in front of you, where you see not only its most arrogant assertions but also your own image in its arms, and the vision becomes only a greasy slick on the clear lens of the mind. For several moments in the fear chamber of the plane's cabin I practiced watching terror slip out of the unknown to make an image of myself to its dimensions. Whenever I could see that self as other, as simply a mysterious but familiar projection of unknown origin on a scrim of mist, I found the ground of freedom. It was hard at those times not to draw close to an image of stillness and intention to dispel illusion in the form of Prajna Paramita, wisdom's mother. My sincere thanks to the King of the Nagas and his disciple.

How does it work, that in modern times the idea of emptiness, which denotes grief, still can come to imply the ultimate freedom? I have to wonder about the mechanics of that reverse fold which transforms the experience of profound loss into extraordinarily rare equanimity when the idioms bleed into each other, and empty becomes full.